ABSTRACT
When philanthropist John D. Rockefeller decided to bankroll a new research university in the American Midwest, he was certainly not anticipating ethnographic studies of inverts, degenerates, and homosexuals. One bright, cold morning in the fall of 1921, Burgess was surprised to find a "vagabond" waiting at his office door: about thirty years old, tall, gaunt, shabbily dressed, with sharp eyes and huge hands. Prey to the red pens of University of Chicago Press editors, the graduate students' hundreds of pages of reports, their forays into drag balls and speakeasies and cabarets, their interviews with pansies and the "normal men" who have sex with them, have mostly been deleted from published accounts. Edwin Sutherland was from the Great Plains, but he grew up in cities prone to many urban vices: Kansas City, Kansas, and Grand Island, Nebraska.
